Many collaborative groups and associations rely on holding conferences to advance their work and disseminate information. While attending a conference meeting in person allows the attendee to experience and participate in the meeting as intended, remote participants (e.g., attending over the Internet) often are subjected to a much lower quality experience due to pre-distribution of older versions of presentation slides, poor audio quality, transmission interruptions due to server crashes, and so forth. These factors diminish the ability for remote participants to attend the meeting in real time in any meaningful way. In current systems for distributing “live” conference meeting contents to remote participants, the contents are gathered and managed by a central server. As such, any problem experienced by the server affects all of the meeting contents routed through the server. For instance, server-related disruptions such as a server crash will affect all of the content provided to that server.
Multicast distribution allows for one-to-many communication without requiring prior knowledge of the receivers. However, multicast distribution does not require prior knowledge of the senders, which can lead to confusion regarding origination, particularly when there are multiple (or an undetermined number) of possible senders. Briefly, multicast uses network infrastructure efficiently by requiring the source to send a packet only once, even if it needs to be delivered to a large number of receivers. The nodes in the network take care of replicating the packet to reach multiple receivers only where necessary. A multicast group IP address is used by sources and the receivers to send and receive content. Sources use the multicast group IP address as the destination address in their data packets. Receivers use this multicast group IP address to inform the network that they are interested in receiving packets sent to that group.
In certain conferencing approaches, the contents delivered to remote participants are gathered into three groups, namely the audio stream for the session, the presentation slides, and the notes and comments developed by scribes (referred to as “jabber”). These three groups of meeting contents are managed differently by different people, and as such preparations are made before the meeting to ensure that all contents are properly delivered. For example, the audio stream may be managed through a centralized server, separate from the servers through which the presentation slides and jabber content are routed. Each of these servers may be prone to crashing, resulting in disruption of all the content provided by that server. While interruption of the presentation slides may be mitigated by distributing a copy of the slides ahead of the meeting, the slide contents are often being revised up to the time of the meeting, and thus the remote participants cannot always rely on materials provided prior to the meeting.
These and other issues remain challenging to multicast-type and other conferencing approaches.